


Everything is All Right

by eternaleponine



Series: Ghosts That We Knew [12]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Deleted Scene, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-13
Updated: 2013-12-13
Packaged: 2018-01-04 13:02:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1081324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eternaleponine/pseuds/eternaleponine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A deleted scene that takes place after Chapter 15 of <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/951779/chapters/1861493">Time for a Sign</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything is All Right

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Brita212](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brita212/gifts).



Jessica picked up her phone, put it down again, stared at it, pushed it away, picked up her history book, put it down again, picked up her phone...

She wasn't sure how many times she repeated the cycle before she finally slid her finger across the screen, bringing up the menu for her contacts (there weren't many) and dialed the number that she'd been resisting calling since the day before. She wasn't even sure _why_ she hadn't called; she just didn't want to dump her problems on someone else, she guessed.

"Hello?"

The voice on the other end was muffled, confused, like she'd just woken up and still had her face half buried in her pillow. Jessica glanced at the clock. It was almost 11:00 am. Even when she tried to sleep in, the latest she'd ever managed was quarter to nine. She'd been trained all her life to get up early, and it was a hard habit to break. "Carol?"

"Yeah?"

"It's Jessica."

"Jess? Shit, what time is it? Am I late?" A note of panic crept into Carol's voice, and Jess could hear her fumbling around.

"No, no. Nothing like that. It's all right. Just... we don't even have..." An appointment? That seemed like the wrong word. "We hadn't set a time for you to come over." They actually hadn't set up specific times in weeks. It had just sort of become the assumption that Carol would show up at some point on Sunday afternoon, and they would work on homework together, sometimes with Natasha and Clint and sometimes not, and then she would stay for dinner, which was always homemade pizza. Jessica didn't even officially need a tutor anymore; they'd managed to get her caught up enough that she wasn't flailing (and failing). But it didn't hurt to have a little support, and they had a good time.

"Oh. Good." It sounded like Carol flopped back onto her bed. "What's going on?"

"I just..." Jessica sighed. "I don't know. Do you ever just get stuck in your own head and you don't know what to do, because all you want to do is stop thinking whatever it is you're thinking, but you can't?"

"Yeah," Carol said, sighing too. "Yeah, I know that feeling."

Jess hesitated, her fingers tightening around the phone. "You want to—"

At the same time, Carol started to say, "Do you want me to—"

They both stopped, waited, laughed a bit nervously. "Go ahead," Jess said. Carol didn't say anything, so Jessica said, "I was just going—"

"I thought maybe—"

They laughed again, this time with a little less tension in their voices. "Go ahead," Carol said. "I'll shut up."

Jessica chewed the inside of her cheek. "I was just going to ask if you want to come over a little early today," she said. "Just to... hang out."

"Sure," Carol said, and Jess could hear the smile in her voice. " _I_ was going to ask if you wanted me to come over a little early, just to hang out. Great minds and all that, right?"

Jess wasn't sure what she meant, but she agreed anyway. "Right."

"So I'll get up, get showered, and I'll be over in a little bit." There was a pause, then Carol asked, "Will you be all right?"

_Do I really sound that bad?_ , Jess wondered. "I'm fine," she said. 

"All right," Carol said, apparently deciding it wasn't worth the argument. Jessica was grateful for that. "I'll see you soon."

"Okay. Bye." Jessica hung up and got up to tidy her room, even though Carol had seen it in its disastrous state more than once. Growing up she'd always been made to keep her room neat enough that anyone could have walked in at any time and not found fault with it, but it wasn't her natural inclination. Unlike her internal alarm clock, the enforced neatness had been an easy habit to break. But she needed something to do, and even though she hated _why_ it had an effect on her, it did help her calm down. It was like by putting everything back in its place, she was putting her mind back in order.

The trouble was, the order wasn't entirely of her own making, and sometimes that scared her, how easy it felt like it would be to fall back into old patterns, to just slip back into the conditioning that she'd been subjected to her entire life. It was why she didn't want to be alone; she was afraid of the places her mind might go if she let them. And sure, Natasha was here, but with her came Clint, and it was impossible not to feel like a third wheel with them.

And anyway, she wasn't sure she really wanted them knowing more about her than they already did. It wasn't like they were jumping at the chance to tell her their stories; she knew that Natasha was here for a reason, but still didn't really know what the reason was, and that Clint was a foster kid but hadn't been for most of his life, but not why.

None of them asked, none of them told. It seemed to work out all right.

When her room was neat, Jessica went downstairs to see if they had the ingredients for cookies. She was getting better in the kitchen... mostly... now that Natasha had taught her how to read a recipe, and now that she'd decided cooking wasn't such a bad thing to know how to do after all. Well, baking, anyway. She was still a little erratic when it came to actually cooking real food for dinner. But she generally liked the end result of baking better anyway.

By the time Carol arrived, her hair still damp from the shower, hanging in loose waves around her face and down her back, Jessica was putting blobs of dough onto a cookie sheet. Carol reached over and stole one, popping it into her mouth with a grin. "Clearly I'm just in time," she said.

Jessica smile back. "I guess so. Want to help?"

Carol grabbed a spoon and used it to portion out the dough, careful to make sure that they were all roughly the same size. "Nat and Clint here?" she asked.

"Upstairs," Jessica said. 

Carol nodded, the corner of her mouth quirking up like she knew what they were up to. Jessica wasn't sure about that, but it was certainly possible. It wasn't really any of her business what they were doing, and she tried not to think about it too much. "How much homework do you have?" she asked.

"Not too much," Jessica replied. "The biggest thing was a paper for English, but I got that done Friday. I have some math, and a lab report I have to finish, but that's about it."

"All right," Carol said. "Do you want to work on that while the cookies are in the oven, then?"

Jessica hesitated; that wasn't why she'd asked Carol here, and she'd though the other girl understood that, but maybe not. "All right," she said after a minute. "Let me go grab my bag."

But as they sat down and got to work, she thought she understood. She had to stay in the kitchen anyway while the cookies were baking, so why not take advantage of it to get stuff done, freeing up the rest of the afternoon. Although the lab report took longer than the cookies did, they finished it just as Natasha and Clint were coming down for lunch. 

"Cookies are still warm," Jessica said, gathering her things. "Enjoy."

"Thanks," Clint said, his mouth already full. Good thing she'd made them to eat, and not to take in to school or something. 

Jessica rolled her eyes. "Come on," she said, nudging Carol gently. "Let's go upstairs."

Carol followed without question, although she blinked in confusion, or maybe concern, when she saw how unforgivingly neat her room was. "Mr. Fury lay down the law?" she asked. 

"No," Jessica said. "I just... needed something to do. To clear my head." She sat down on the edge of the bed, and Carol, after another second's hesitation, shut the door and joined her. 

"Huh," she said. "So... what's really going on, then?"

"What makes you think something's going on?" Jess asked. 

"Because I know you," Carol said, her voice dropping low like she was telling her a secret. "Maybe not as well as I'd like to, but I know you, I think, at least a little, and I know when something's bothering you."

"I'm fine," Jess protested. "Nothing's bothering me."

"You called," Carol said. "You never call me."

"I call you all the time!" Jessica said. 

Carol shook her head. "No. You don't. We talk all the time, yes, but _I_ call _you_. I don't think you've ever called me, unless it was because I'd missed you and you were calling me back. You've never just called me out of nowhere. So what's going on?"

She was right, Jessica realized. She'd never really thought about it before, but Carol was right. She sighed. "Just... something happened yesterday, and it shook me up. That's all."

But obviously that wasn't all, and Carol knew it. She just sat there, leaning forward slightly, her gaze so intent that Jessica couldn't face it. She looked away. Seconds ticked by, but Carol still said nothing. A minute passed, more, and finally she reached out, took Jessica's hand, wrapped her fingers around the other girl's and squeezed. "Tell me," she whispered. 

"There's nothing to tell, really," Jessica said. "I just..."

It should have been simple to say it. _We were shopping and I ran into my mother but we got away._ But there was so much more to it, and she wasn't sure she could explain, or would want to, but if she couldn't tell Carol, who could she tell? Should she tell? Did she want to?

All she wanted was a normal life. All she wanted was to be a normal girl. But obviously Carol already knew she wasn't; she already knew that she'd come from somewhere where she hadn't gotten much education, where there had been a lot of expectations about what girls did and didn't do... She just didn't know the details.

And maybe it would feel better to just get it out in the open?

But what if it didn't, or what if it changed how Carol looked at her, or what if...

What if she lived the rest of her life in fear, like she'd lived the first sixteen years? Fear and anger. It fueled her, but it also ate away at her, and was that really what she wanted? As long as she kept secrets, as long as she let them hold her back, she hadn't really escaped, had she?

"My mother," she said. "I saw my mother."

She glanced at Carol, who was leaning in, listening with her whole body, and there was something in her eyes that just... something inside of her broke and it all started to spill out. "We were shopping, and my mother and some of the other women were there. I don't know why; we don't even really celebrate Christmas. Not like you celebrate Christmas. There are no gifts or anything. Not for us, anyway. Maybe it was just a regular shopping trip for the things that we – _they_ can't make for themselves. But she saw me, caught me... she called me by _his_ name." Jessica shuddered. "She called me Jessica Mason. I'm _not_ a Mason. I will never _be_ a Mason. It's why I left."

"Who is Mason?" Carol asked. "Who is he?"

"The leader," Jessica said. "The prophet. The one everyone follows. The one... I was never good at following their rules. I never fit in. I never wanted to. And when I turned sixteen, they decided..." She took a breath; it caught in her throat and stuck. 

Carol wrapped her free arm around Jess's back, rubbing it in slow circles. "It's all right," she said. "It's okay. You're okay."

It was what she told Jessica all the time when she saw her getting worked up, and every time it drew her back down, settled her, like all she needed was someone else to tell her for it to be true. Which she should have hated, because wasn't that what she'd been conditioned for – to seek someone else to tell her what she was thinking and feeling? But it was different with Carol. If she'd told Carol that she wasn't okay, Carol wouldn't have argued. She probably would have just told her all right, she wasn't, but she would be, and she was there until Jess was okay, and if there was anything she could do...

"They decided that the only way to settle me down, to... to..." She searched for the right word, couldn't find it, maybe it didn't exist. "To... the only way to make me accept it, to break down the last of my resistance, was to marry me to him. Which... didn't happen. Not officially. Not legally. There was... it wasn't a big ceremony, it never is, but..." 

She shook her head. "It meant something to them, to him, but not to me. I wasn't going to... to let them take what made me _me_ and not just one of them away. They tried. He tried. He..." 

But it was more than she could say all at once. More than she could deal with, more than she could live with anyone knowing. So she stopped herself. "I got out, though. I got away. It's just... seeing my mother, having her turn up like that... It reminded me that I'm not safe here. I'm not safe anywhere, really. Not until I'm eighteen. They could always try to get me back."

"They won't," Carol said. "We won't let them."

It wasn't a promise she could make, and they both knew it, but Jessica nodded anyway. "I know."

It sat heavy between them, except there really was no space between them, so it was forced to settle around them instead, and when Carol slid her other arm around her, pulling her into a hug, and held tight, she didn't object. 

It wasn't _the_ answer, but it was _an_ answer, at least for now. And she would take what she could get.

**Author's Note:**

> For [Brita212](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Brita212) and also just because I wanted to write it.


End file.
